


The Boot

by chuusei_teki_na_koe



Series: Out the Barrel of a Gun [1]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Angst, Break Up, First Time, Gen, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 14:47:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18345830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuusei_teki_na_koe/pseuds/chuusei_teki_na_koe
Summary: Punching out a certain asshole who didn't know how to respect women lands Akira in juvenile detention. And it's an authoritarian shithole, but at least there's one good thing here: Ryuji.(prequel to Out the Barrel of a Gun. Not necessary to read this to get that.)





	The Boot

**Author's Note:**

> This was a prequel story originally written for a rather wildly different version of Out the Barrel of a Gun, so I sort of re-wrote and tweaked it a bit, and voila. But you can see some traces of the original ideas in there. Mostly in that Akira can't shut up about anarchism. Guess it was just a phase.
> 
> Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode is the soundtrack for this.

 

It was frankly a fight over nothing, and Akira suspected the other guy was aware of it, too.

Akira was new at the juvenile detention centre, and unawares, he'd taken a seat at a table that a certain group of guys always preferred to occupy. They asked him to move, and Akira said no. One particularly hot-headed guy grabbed him by the shirt, and it turned into a fight, with the others circling around them and cheering on Akira's opponent. The two of them took swings at each other, both of them landing a few (and man could the guy hit hard) until Akira got lucky and the guy tripped over a bolt on the floor where a table had once been nailed down there, and Akira got on top of him, ready to give him a good one in the face—

This was the point where the correctional officers showed up and tore them apart, much to Akira's chagrin. “You got lucky!” Akira yelled at him as they dragged him away, and the other guy gave him the finger as he was also dragged away in the other direction.

Predictably, Akira was given a dressing-down and made to spend some time alone.

Left with nothing to do, he lay down on the bed in the isolation cell and had a nap, where he dreamed of nothing at all, as usual.

Before long, he was released again. Following which, he and the guy he'd fought with were forced to bow and apologize formally to each other. Akira wasn't feeling sincere about it, and he was pretty sure the other guy was apologizing through his teeth, too. But this was part of the system, and that was that.

And so his regimented lifestyle recommenced.

Wake up. Breakfast. Chores. Assembly. School time. Lunch. School time. Study Diary. Free hour. Self-reflection. Bed.

Every day. It was so repetitive here, it was hard to keep a mental calendar. Doing the same things, eating the same food, wearing the same bland blue jumpsuit day in, day out, it didn't take long for all the days to blur into each other.

Akira found the right table to sit at, separating himself from the various groups and their affiliations. He wasn't really interested in making friends here.

So he was surprised and wary when, one day, the guy who had jumped him before took his lunch tray not to his usual table, but came over to where Akira and a handful of other loner-types sat to stand awkwardly there, holding his lunch.

Akira tensed, ready for shit to start, but it seemed today, there would be none of that.

“Um...” the guy shifted on his feet. There wasn't much to say about his appearance. He sported the same shaved head, blue jumpsuit, and baseline smoldering resentment that the rest of them did. “Sorry about the other day. I was just looking for an excuse beat someone up. I was a dumbass. Mind if I sit here?”

Startled, Akira nodded, and the guy slid onto the seat opposite him. “Didn't we both already apologize?” Akira asked.

“Yeah,” said the guy, “But that one don't count.”

Akira had to grin at that. “For real.”

“I'm Ryuji,” the guy introduced himself.

“Akira.”

They didn't bother with ages or surnames. Party of policy at the detention centre. People were supposed to share as little personal information as possible, and if it was known they'd told others where they were from or what they were in for, they would be immediately transferred to another facility. It was supposed to be to stop them from forming gangs when they left, but Akira had his own opinions about the real goal of that rule.

Of course, being forbidden to talk about yourself made it a hell of a lot harder to get to know someone. There were different norms of conversation here, and people asked different questions of each other.

“I like to work out durin' free hour,” Ryuji said. “You wanna join me?” There it was. _What do you do during free hour?_ The only question anyone ever asked.

“I usually read,” Akira said. “But the books here suck. I'll work out with you.”

x x x

Akira joined Ryuji for the first time that evening in the yard, mostly doing body weight exercises. They didn't have any resistance machines or anything here, not even dumbbells—they must have figured the boys would use them as weapons or something. What they had was one pull up bar, and that was it.

Ryuji made full fucking use of that pull up bar, though, banging out an ungodly number of pull ups, leg raises, and even one-arm pull ups. It seemed Ryuji usually hogged the bar to himself during free hour, and the other boys turned to stare when they saw him letting Akira give it a shot.

Or maybe they were just staring at how fucking cut Ryuji was. Akira sure as hell was staring. Ryuji did his workout shirtless, either because he was working up a sweat or because he wanted to give everyone free tickets to the gun show, Akira didn't know. But his rock-hard body certainly distinguished him from all the other identical buzz cuts and blue jumpsuits.

Akira wasn't in bad shape, but he couldn't compete with Ryuji, and it wasn't long before he was lying on the grass with that wibbly feeling in all his muscles. “I'm gonna be sore as hell tomorrow...”

Ryuji grinned down at him, glistening with sweat like a goddamn athletic model. “Aw, you've got a long way to go, man.” He plopped himself down next to Akira on the grass.

“Why'd you approach me?” Akira asked him suddenly. “Did the councillor tell you to do that?”

“Nah,” said Ryuji. “He seems to think the formal apology is actually meaningful.” He leaned back to lie on the grass next to Akira. “You put up a good fight, so I wanted to talk to you, see what you're like.”

“And the verdict?”

“I ain't givin' you no verdicts. I think we've both had enough of those,” he grumbled.

“Ha!” Akira gave an almost-laugh. “But we're not supposed to talk about that.”

“Oh, don't worry, I'm not talkin' about nothin',” Ryuji said, the bitter snap of irony in his voice.

“Yeah, gotta follow the rules,” Akira agreed, equally sarcastic. “I'm not going to tell you what I did. I'm just going to tell you...” he rolled over and faced Ryuji, pitching his voice low so that only he could hear. “...that I don't fucking regret anything.”

Ryuji turned his head around in surprise, then grinned at him. “Neither do I. Fucker deserved it.”

“Wish I could've gone further,” Akira agreed, and they smiled at each other conspiratorially.

Neither of them could say anything else, though, as the buzzer rang, signalling that their free hour was over, and it was time for “self-reflection”—which nobody did, obviously. Basically for Akira, this meant reading. And then bed.

But hanging out with Ryuji had broken the routine, so that night, it wasn't so bad.

x x x

After that, they worked out together during free hour every day. Akira was, as he'd predicted, sore as hell the next day, but after a couple of weeks of pain, he started getting used to it. Aside from body weight exercises, Ryuji ran—and he was hell of a runner. He didn't say anything about it, but it was clear to Akira that he'd been an athlete at some point, because he could outrun any of the other boys in the center by a long shot. On a good day, he would run circles around Akira—but on bad days, he'd just say he didn't want to run, and Akira could see he was trying to hide a limp. Akira didn't ask.

On good days, though, they came up with competitions that would give Akira a sizable handicap, a running start, and when Akira finally managed to beat Ryuji with a handicap, he felt pretty accomplished.

“You're getting better,” Ryuji said, arm slung around his shoulder that day after their workout. “And less squishy,” he pinched Akira's stomach.

“Hey!” Akira elbowed him in the (rock-hard) gut, hard enough to make Ryuji stagger away and disengage from Akira's shoulders. Ryuji was very touchy in a boys-locker-room bro sort of way, and it made Akira uncomfortable in a sweaty-shirtless-guy-touching-me-oh-my-god sort of way.

“Ow!” Ryuji bent over, rubbing his stomach. “That wasn't necessary, man!”

Akira was glad when the buzzer freed him from having to explain his reasons for elbowing Ryuji in the gut, letting him dash off to some self-reflection time—mostly reflecting on his boner.

x x x

As predicted, on visitation day, Akira's parents did not show up. Of course, here in juvie, he was not the only one with crappy parents, and the yard was full of guys who had no one to show up and give a shit about them and were forced to entertain themselves in other ways. Akira was doing some stretches and thinking about moving on to push-ups when Ryuji showed up and grabbed him by the arm instead.

“C'mon, dude,” he said, tugging Akira away over to the visitors room.

“Huh? What?”

“Just come on,” Ryuji insisted, and confused, Akira followed.

A couple minutes later, Akira was facing Ryuji's mom and feeling rather mystified.

At this centre, they were allowed to meet with family face-to-face, with no intervening glass, provided visitors went through a body check first to make sure they weren't bringing in any contraband. So Ryuji's mom got to fuss over her son personally, commenting about how his jumpsuit didn't fit properly, and it was a shame they wouldn't let her alter it.

“This is my best friend, Akira,” Ryuji introduced him, and Akira suppressed a blush. He was really touched that Ryuji thought of him that way, and felt rather like a guy being introduced to his girlfriend's parents (Or maybe that was just wishful thinking).

“It's good to meet you, Akira,” she said as they stood up from the circular table in the visitors' room to bow to each other. “You can call me Ms. Sakamoto.” Sakamoto. So that was Ryuji's surname. “I'm glad to see Ryuji's made a good friend here.” She gave him a real sincere smile, and Akira could tell that she meant it.

Akira found out that she ran a small business our of her home as a seamstress during the day, and worked as a hostess at a snack bar at night. Judging from the fact that she was working this much, Akira figured there was no man in the picture.

“And he's a good influence, too!” Ryuji said of Akira, practically bragging. “This guy gets the best grades here. He's way too smart to be in juvie.” Ryuji prodded Akira, who sat to the left of him in the circular table, his mom sitting across from them.

“I don't think being in juvie has anything to do with being dumb,” Akira said, but Ryuji wasn't having any of it.

“Naw, you know it's mostly dumb hotheads like me here. That's why we end up in this place. Too many muscles, not enough brain cells,” he muttered.

“You're not dumb, Ryuji,” Akira said. “If you call yourself dumb, if everyone else calls you dumb, you'll make yourself that way. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Ryuji grinned. “See?” he said to his mom. “He's smart, and a nice guy, too! You're too good for juvie, Akira!” He jabbed Akira's shoulder with a little playful punch that was probably a touch stronger than most peoples' playful punches, and Akira rubbed his shoulder.

They talked for a little while, and Akira learned a little about Ryuji. He seemed really close with his mom, and he tried really hard to assure her that things were going okay, that he was on the right track, he was going to have a high school diploma and then get out. He talked to her about what he was studying, about Akira helping him study, and about his plans once he was out. His mother, for her part, was encouraging and hopeful, but clearly looked tired.

Neither of them asked about his parents, but in a place like this, they could all infer the obvious. Ryuji's mom was kind to him, and gripped his hand in a warm handshake before she left, thanking him for being a friend to Ryuji, and asking that he take good care of her son.

Once again, Akira felt like he was accepting Ryuji as his bride. It wasn't a bad feeling.

Immediately after she left, in the brief few minutes of milling about before everyone was sorted back to their rooms, one of the guys Akira recognized from Ryuji's lunch table came around to smack Ryuji on the back in macho greeting. “Oh, hey, is this your buddy Akira?” the guy said, with a look at Ryuji. “What's going on here? Come to introduce your girlfriend to your parents?”

Ryuji shot him a look. “Lay off, Take.”

But it seemed the guy was on a roll, and not inclined to stop. “Or wait, are you the chick here, and he's asking your dad's permission?” He cackled.

Ryuji's expression turned particularly sour. “Fuck off!” He snapped, hands in pockets and belligerent as hell, but as controlled as Ryuji ever got. “This whole place is full of cock-suckers, so don't you act like it's ammo you can use against me. We both know you've been taking it from Yasu all month.”

The guy Ryuji had addressed as Take responded by promptly punching Ryuji in the face. Ryuji took a swing back at him, but Akira held him back before anything could connect. “Don't. Fighting him isn't going to get you anything,” Akira said.

“It'll get me some fucking satisfaction!” Ryuji yelled, breaking out of Akira's grip, but he didn't punch the other guy. He just turned around to head back to his room.

“Aw, what's wrong, you scared of a fight?” Take yelled. “Your girlfriend really does have you whipped!”

Ryuji spun around, came back, and punched Take full in the jaw.

x x x

Inevitably, this ended up with Ryuji pinning Take on the ground and wailing on him until the correctional officers split them up and threw Ryuji into solitary. So for a few days, Akira was left alone during free hour. He thought about reverting to his old hobby of reading, but somehow, he found himself working out anyway, even if he couldn't push himself as hard without Ryuji around.

As he was jogging around the yard, he couldn't help but think back on how when Take had accused them of fucking, Ryuji hadn't denied anything.

x x x

Ryuji came back from solitary sullen and angry, and at lunch time, he walked right by the table of guys he normally hung out with to make a beeline for Akira instead. The guys all noticed this, but didn't say anything—yet.

“Welcome back,” Akira said when Ryuji plopped his tray down opposite Akira. Ryuji just grunted, looking at his tray.

Akira flicked a pea at his forehead, making Ryuji blink and look up. “Gotcha,” Akira said, and Ryuji just barely cracked a grin.

“How old are you?”

“I'm trying my best to maintain my inner child.”

“I think my inner child died a long time ago,” Ryuji scowled.

“Oh, I don't think so,” Akira said with a cheeky grin. “You still get angry like a kid.”

Ryuji opened his mouth to argue back, realized it was futile, then sunk deep into the bench. “I need to get out of here. I can't handle another year and a half.”

“I've got about a year.”

This was on the line of information they weren't allowed to share, so they both kept their voices low.

“I don't even know what I wanna do when I get out,” Ryuji continued. “it's hard for me to think that far ahead. I'm not even sure there's anything else. Maybe this is all there is. What if I get out and it's just more of this, except instead of this place, it's just some shitty job?” He leaned forward, dropping his forehead onto the counter top. “I have no future.”

“You're just feeling shitty because you were in solitary,” Akira told him. “We'll work out hard during free hour today. It'll make you feel better.”

“I hope so...”

“C'mon, eat your food.”

Fortunately, it didn't take much convincing to get Ryuji to eat. The boy was a vacuum cleaner in human form.

x x x

In the yard that day, they went through the usual work out routine, but strangely, Ryuji never took his shirt off. “I'm cold,” he said, when Akira asked, and Akira wasn't really buying it. It was only September, and really not cold at all yet.

But Akira didn't ask. And after that, Ryuji stopped taking his shirt off at all.

x x x

Ryuji tended to get himself thrown in solitary for about a few days a month for fighting with other guys, leaving Akira to his own devices during free hour. It was on one of these days when a guy Akira didn't really know, but who he recognized was a part of the group Ryuji had used to hang out with during free hour, approached him.

“I'm just warning you,” he said. “If Ryuji bails on us to go solo, it's not gonna be good for him. I'm saying this because he's a good guy and I don't wanna see him get hurt. So when he's out of solitary, you talk to him. Tell him he needs to hang with us.” And then the guy left as quick as he'd come.

When Ryuji got out of solitary, Akira relayed this message to him during lunch hour.

“Fuck that,” Ryuji said, poking his food. “They don't actually want me around. They just want me 'cause they know I can beat the shit out of their rivals.” He stuffed a potato into his face. “If they wanna start shit with me, then they can fuckin' bring it.”

“That guy seemed concerned about you.”

“Was he the guy with the broken nose?” Ryuji asked. Akira nodded. “Yeah, Jin's a nice guy. But he's a coward. ...Not like I'm any less of one,” he muttered.

“Are they a gang, or what?” Akira asked.

Ryuji shrugged. “Officially? No. Basically: yes. They're the reason we're not allowed to talk about our families. Pretty much all of them have dads or brothers in the yakuza.” Ryuji realized he'd been speaking at full volume and jerked his head around to see if anyone had heard, but fortunately, it seemed no one had been listening.

Akira blinked. “So do you have family in the yakuza?”

Ryuji shifted uncomfortably. “Maybe? That's what I told them, anyway. I was just scared when I first came here and I wanted to look badass. So I told them my dad was a wakagashira. I mean, he might be. He was always kinda vague about his work, and when I ask Mom, she never says anything, either. So what the hell else could he be but a criminal?” Ryuji stabbed a potato. “Guess you can't fight blood.”

“Whatever,” Akira said, munching on his own lunch. “Criminality is arbitrary. It's defined by the state in order to establish an under-class, part of an authoritarian system designed to facilitate conformity.”

Ryuji stared at him, a crumble of potato dropping out of his mouth. “What?”

Akira grinned back at him. “I'm saying it's all bullshit and people are people.”

Ryuji swallowed his potato. “What kinda fuckin' books do you read, Akira?”

“Dead Russian anarchists, mostly.”

“Yeah, I have a feeling they don't carry that sort of shit in the library here.”

“Well, of course not. They don't want us getting _ideas._ ”

x x x

As Jin had promised, shit got bad for Ryuji. The number of guys looking for fights with him tripled, and every time there was a fight, somehow, it ended up being Ryuji's fault—either because Ryuji was too good in a fight and tended to come out on top, or because of something else. And Ryuji ended up spending a hell of a lot more time in solitary.

And every time he came back from solitary, he moved like he was more sore than he had been after his fights (which he usually came out of fairly unscathed).

When Ryuji came out of one stint in solitary limping worse than usual, Akira decided that enough was enough, and he wasn't going to wait any longer for Ryuji to be the one to talk about this.

“What the fuck is going on in solitary, Ryuji?” Akira asked him at lunch time that day.

“Nothin'.” Ryuji was looking down at his plate. He was a real shit liar.

“Bullshit,” said Akira. “You're beat up and you're bad at hiding it. Who's doing it to you? One of the guys?”

Ryuji bit his lip and shook his head. But it seemed he realized holding out any longer was futile. “No. One of the guards.” He kept his eyes down on his food, which was untouched—an alarm bell sign for Ryuji the vacuum cleaner. “...Practically every time I'm in solitary, he comes in to beat the shit out of me for kicks. He knows nobody will believe me if I say it's him, 'cause I'm in fights all the time.”

Suddenly, Ryuji slammed his fist on the table, causing faces to turn around and look at them. But Ryuji was ignoring them. “And the guys fucking all know it, too. They just start fights to get me sent into solitary. I'm a _troublemaker,_ so the fights are always my fault.”

Akira's heart ached for him. He wanted to do something. “I could go beat up the guys for you.”

Ryuji laughed. Not a nice laugh. “Thanks, but that won't help anything. They'd just start going after you, too. It's like eight against one. The two of us aren't gonna intimidate them. And I've already extended my own sentence for too many fights. I don't wanna do that to you, too.” His fist squeezed on the table. “Don't start any fights for me, okay? Please.”

Akira had felt helpless plenty of times before in life, but this one had to top the cake: his best friend was getting the shit beaten out of him on the regular, and he was telling Akira to stand by and watch. “I could talk to the councilor about it. Or one of the teachers.”

“NO!” Ryuji practically yelled, sending more heads turning his way. He tried to calm himself a little, lowered his voice. “Do you think I haven't fucking tried? This guy has everyone here on his side.” Ryuji plopped his forehead on the table. This was coming to be a common pose for him, lately. “The world is full of fuckers like him. The system is made for them. In here, outside...there's the people with power, and then people like us. And they grind us into the dirt. Over. And over. And over.”

The way Ryuji spoke, Akira got the feeling he was talking about what had gotten him in juvie in the first place. So he didn't ask for details. Instead, he said, “That's what power does. Those who have it, abuse it. The only way to stop them is to take their power away.”

Ryuji lifted his head, frowning. “And how are we supposed to do that?”

“Us? Right now? We probably can't,” Akira admitted. “But...maybe once we're out, we can participate in enacting some painfully slow political change, most likely at great personal cost.”

Ryuji groaned. “You and your politics. Painfully slow political change isn't gonna help me right here, right now.”

“Then crush capitalism with baseball bats? Smashy smashy?” Akira shrugged. “Radical politics in Japan basically died on the vine in the early 70's. We'd have better luck leaving the country.”

“Your ideas suck, man.” Ryuji started stabbing at his food. Well, this was an improvement. Akira had managed to distract him from his misery, at least.

“Right now, ideas are all I've got,” Akira admitted, his tone bleaker than he wanted to admit. “So I can talk to you about Kropotkin so you can have something to make fun of and I can feel smart, or we can sit here and be miserable.”

Ryuji gave a weak chuckle. “All right, talk to me about this crock pot guy.”

“See? It's working already.”

x x x

Eventually, the guys seemed to get bored of giving Ryuji shit, and his trips to solitary decreased to their previous levels.

Unfortunately, the degree to which the guard at solitary beat him seemed to increase proportionally, until one day, Ryuji eventually declined working out in the yard, and went back to his bunk instead. Knowing how hard Ryuji usually pushed himself, Akira knew this meant it was bad.

They weren't supposed to visit other rooms, but a little bit of negotiation and a little bit of sneaking could make it happen (and it fact, it happened all the time). So Akira got himself into Ryuji's room, stepping in to find Ryuji was the only one there. The others were all in the yard.

“You okay?” Akira asked, lamely. Obviously, Ryuji was not.

“I'm fine.” Ryuji lied in a muffled voice, lying face down on the pillow.

“Your lying is getting worse,” Akira said. “Get beat up worse than usual?”

“...No.” This time, it didn't sound like he was lying.

“Then what happened?”

There was a long silence. Akira waited.

“...That stupid asshole...” Ryuji began, face still on the pillow. Akira assumed he meant that guard. “...said I was...useless...and I'll never...amount to anything.” He clenched the pillow, turning away from Akira. “...what a stupid thing...to get upset about...right? But my dad...used to say that to me...and it hurt more than the punches.” His voice cracked, and his shoulders were shaking.

Akira climbed up to the bunk—it was awkward and the bunk was small, so he just sort of had to flop down on top of Ryuji, hug him, and hope this wasn't too weird. But Ryuji didn't push him off or anything, just cried himself out, until they were both left lying there awkwardly, Ryuji on his side and Akira sort of crouching on top of him.

“Sorry,” Ryuji said, pulling his face out of the pillow, but didn't look at Akira.

“Don't apologize,” Akira said. His hands were safe in Ryuji's shoulder area, but he was quickly becoming very aware of how close they were, and yet simultaneously really didn't want to pull away.

“No, I mean—” Ryuji blushed. “I'm making it weird, now.”

“Huh?” Akira looked down at him. Their faces were close. Too close.

“I'm, uh...kinda hard.” Ryuji rolled over underneath him, so he was on his back, and suddenly their faces were about an inch from each other, and Akira was staring down into his eyes.

Akira blinked. “Me, too.” And he kissed Ryuji.

Things moved fast. About thirty seconds after they started kissing, Ryuji had his hand down past the elastic waistband of Akira's sweat pants, jerking him off. Akira slumped against Ryuji's neck, gripping Ryuji's shaved head with one hand and moaning softly at the touch. His other hand, he slid down to guide Ryuji's hand, showing him just how he liked it. He came fast—he hadn't beaten off for a few days, and he'd been wanting Ryuji basically all year. Ryuji wiped his hand off on the corner of the sheets, but Akira didn't have time to be grossed out, he had Ryuji's pants pulled down and Ryuji's cock in his mouth, and that didn't last long, either, as Ryuji came just about as fast as he had. At least Akira swallowed it instead of wiping it on the sheets.

Akira flopped on top of Ryuji, apologized when Ryuji yelped because of his bruises, and they both lay there for a minute in silence.

“I like you, Ryuji,” Akira said, finally, nuzzling his face into Ryuji's neck and wrapping his arms underneath him for a hug.

“Heh. Well, everyone already thinks I'm fucking you, anyway.” Ryuji's arms wrapped around him in turn. “I like you too, Akira.”

“Wait, do they assume I'm the bottom?”

“Uhh, yeah.” Ryuji rolled them over so that they were both lying on their sides. “I'm clearly the more macho one, here.”

“Hey, some macho guys like getting fucked!”

“Not in juvie, they don't,” Ryuji muttered.

“Well,” Akira said, “I guess I'll admit that I wouldn't mind taking your dick. But I'd rather have it the other way around.”

His bluntness seemed to embarrass Ryuji, who blushed. “I've actually...uh...never done it with a guy before.” His voice dropped to a squeak. “Or a girl.”

“So I'm your first?”

“...Yeah.”

“I hope it was a good first.”

“Fuck yeah.” Ryuji kissed him and squeezed him, and his arms were the warmest thing Akira had felt in years.

x x x

The other person who came to visit Ryuji besides his mom was a girl Akira would have assumed was his girlfriend if he hadn't known otherwise. Or maybe not. She was kinda out of his league.

“I'm Ann,” she introduced herself with a beaming smile. “I'm so glad I could finally meet you, Akira. Can I call you Akira?”

“Of course,” Akira replied from his seat opposite her. He, Ryuji and Ann were around one of the little round tables that filled the visitors' room. Some of the guys at a nearby table were blatantly twisting around to ogle Ann, but she was staunchly ignoring them.

“Somehow I can't imagine Ryuji writing letters,” Akira said. They weren't allowed internet connections or cell phones, here.

“Hey, I'm not illiterate, at least!” Ryuji protested.

Ann giggled. “His letters are actually really cute. He has this perfect crisp writing, and he's surprisingly touchy-feely on paper. In this one letter—”

“Nope,” Ryuji cut in hastily, face bright red. “You are not telling him that. How's your life going, Ann? With stuff?”

Ann's smile wilted a bit. “...Well. You know. Nothing's changed.”

“Nothing's changed, huh.” Ryuji muttered.

The two of them stared down at the table a while.

“Is this something we're not allowed to talk about?” Akira inferred. Both of them nodded.

Ann started speaking carefully, as if delicately choosing subjects that were allowed. “A friend of mine...killed herself a while ago, due to...some incidents involving...faculty. There have been...” Her face twisted into a expression of the same sort of fury Akira saw in some of the boys here, the same sort of fury he himself had been swallowing for a good year now— “More incidents.”

Akira could put the pieces together. “Sound like the kind of thing that would piss you off, Ryuji.”

“Yeah,” was all Ryuji said. He was staring at the table like he wanted to drill a hole in it. “It pissed me off, all right.”

“A familiar story,” Akira said with a pointed look at Ryuji. “Sometimes, he deserves it, right?”

Ryuji's eyes lifted from the table to catch Akira's, and he smiled wryly. “Fuck yeah.”

“There's got to be something you can do,” Akira turned the conversation back to Ann.

She shook her head. “Do you think I haven't been trying? But everyone's on his side, and the victims are too scared to talk. And now everyone just thinks of me as that weirdo with an agenda. _'Ann is just upset because of what happened to Shiho'._ And then they write that off as oh, Shiho was just depressed. It's such bullshit.”

Akira was silent for a while before saying, “I think you just have to keep trying. It could take years. People spend their whole lives and careers trying to take down one corrupt individual, and then there's dozens more who get away with it forever. But even if it takes you years, I think it'd be worth it.”

Ann breathed a short sigh. “Years? God, I hope it doesn't take that long. I wish I could just hit him with brainwashing magic or something and solve everything.”

“Yeah, unfortunately, the real world doesn't work like that,” Akira said dryly.

x x x

The next time Ryuji got sent to solitary, he came back with a limp was infinitely worse. He could hardly walk.

Akira cornered him in the lunch room. “Tell me who did this,” he said the most muted, whispered yell of his life.

“No!” Ryuji whisper-yelled back. “Don't start shit. Come on.”

“I didn't _start_ the shit. But I'd sure as hell like to end it.”

Ryuji limped away from the food line to where he and Akira usually sat together these days. “It won't help anybody. You can't do anything. I just have to suck it up until I get outta here.” He sank down into his seat with an obvious look of physical relief.

“This isn't something you should just suck up!” Akira sat down next to him to hiss in his ear. “What if this affects you permanently? What then, huh?”

Ryuji bit his lip, and Akira could tell he'd already thought about that. “I'll be okay,” he said, but his voice was cracking. Akira knew how much running meant to him.

“Tell me,” Akira insisted.

But Ryuji just shook his head, eyes squeezed tight.

x x x

Akira didn't give up there, though.

He had kept himself aloof from the rest of the institution, but he wasn't socially awkward or anything. So he started asking around to see if anyone else knew which guard it was targeting Ryuji.

Most of the guys weren't all that eager to talk to him, but he did eventually manage to pry the info out of one in exchange for some guaranteed time on the pull-up bar during free hour.

The guard looked like a total scumbag, but so did a lot of the guards. There didn't seem to be anything special about this one. But Akira memorized his name and his face, and kept an eye out for him, learning his schedule, figuring out the right moment.

He picked a time when all the guys were just going out into the yard, and this guard was heading for the bathroom. Akira got lucky, and no one was watching as he slipped away, following the guard to the can.

When Akira walked into the bathroom, the guard turned around. “Huh? What are you—”

Akira sucker-punched him in the gut.

Winded, the guard pitched forward, and Akira followed that up with a kick in the man's balls before grabbing him by the hair and dragging him over to a toilet stall to dunk his face into the bowl, then flush.

“This is how a piece of shit deserves to get treated,” Akira said as the man struggled and flailed in the rushing water.

Akira wrenched the guard's face up again so he could look the man square in the eye. “I know I'm gonna get in serious shit for this. And I don't care what happens to me. But if you _touch_ Ryuji again, no matter what happens, no matter how they try to lock me away, I'm going to find you, and I'm _going. To. Kill. You._ Do you understand that?”

The man pissed himself, and Akira laughed.

x x x

Solitary was pretty crazy-making. Akira thought that he actually started to hallucinate at some point. He wasn't sure, maybe it was just a dream. Somewhere in between the lectures from Russian anarchists, Ann's expression of fury and Ryuji's clear attempts to suck down despair, Akira saw the man he'd just beaten.

He was laughing through a broken and bloodied nose, sneering down at Akira. “You think this will change anything?” he said. “You don't know how the world works, kid. Guys like me are everywhere. We rule this world. Either you fall into line, or you get crushed. And there's nothing you can do.”

And the boot came down on him.

x x x

When Ryuji's time was about up, he started giving Akira a strange work-out regimen.

“When you're doing push-ups,” he said, “you get the best work out if you do it like this. Don't forget, okay? _Don't forget_.” He put this weird emphasis on that point, then started to demonstrate, getting down on his hands in the yard. His knee still hurt him, but he could do push-ups fine as long as he put most of his weight on the other leg.

“...A set of eight push-ups, then a set of six. Then...zero pushups. _Zero,_ okay? Remember that.”

Ryuji was so bad at being sneaky. Sitting on the grass in front of him, Akira grinned. “I get it. It's okay. I'll remember.”

“We're practicing this every day to make sure,” Ryuji said, grinning back at him. “Don't want you forgetting the best work-out ever.”

“Best work-out ever,” Akira agreed.

“But man, I can't believe you got yourself stuck here for another year,” Ryuji sighed as he flopped down onto the grass on his stomach. “You're so fuckin' dumb.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Akira lied. After the incident, the guard who'd beaten Ryuji had requested to be transferred to another facility. Maybe he'd just been too ashamed to admit he got beat up and humiliated by a teenager. Maybe Akira had actually scared the shit out of him. Or maybe he just had a better position waiting for him there. Regardless, Akira had predictably gotten in shit for it, and was stuck in for another year, right until the end of high school.

“C'mon, you don't have to pretend with me,” Ryuji said. “I know you beat that guy up.” He paused. “But thanks. Really. ...I don't know anyone else who'd stick their neck out for me like that.” He'd thanked Akira about a million times already, but he just kept saying it. Akira knew he felt guilty.

“What are friends for?” Akira grinned down at him.

Ryuji tilted his head. “Just friends?”

“Well. Our dicks are friends, too.”

Ryuji pushed himself off the ground and jabbed Akira's shoulder playfully. “Yeah, yeah. I know I'm not gonna get any romance out of you.”

In response, Akira grabbed Ryuji's hand, got to his knees, and with a weird flourish, kissed the back of Ryuji's hand like a knight kissing a lady.

Ryuji immediately went bright red and yanked his hand away, then took a half-assed swing at Akira, who dodged it with a laugh.

“You said you wanted romance!” Akira teased.

x x x

When Akira got out of juvenile detention, he got home to find his parents had already packed his bags for him. While he'd expected this, it still hurt. He'd thought he'd get a _welcome home son_ before they inevitably showed him the door. Apparently not.

So with all his worldly possessions in a couple of duffel bags, from a public phone at the local swimming pool, Akira called the “best work-out ever.”

“Hello?” A woman answered. Akira recognized that voice. It was Ryuji's mom.

“Um...hi. I'm not sure if you remember me, but I'm Ryuji's friend, Akira...”

“Oh! It's Akira! Oh, it's so good to hear from you again. Ryuji does nothing but talk about you. I'll get him now.”

“Oh, uh, thanks—”

One whirlwind of a phone call later, and Ryuji's mom was picking him up, saying he could stay with them as long as he needed.

x x x

Ryuji's mom was just so unbelievably kind that Akira couldn't bear to take advantage of her a moment longer than necessary. Ryuji hooked him up with a construction job at the place he worked, and once the two of them had saved up enough money, they got an apartment together.

It was around this time that Ryuji got his first motorcycle. It was an old beat-up Yamaha that seemed to be constantly making some sort of weird noise that it shouldn't, but it was all Ryuji could afford, and he made it run somehow, through judicious use of Googling and tinkering.

When Akira asked, “why a motorcycle?” Ryuji shrugged.

“They're cool?”

“C'mon,” Akira jabbed at him with a wrench as Ryuji knelt in the parking lot with a bunch of tools, trying to fix his latest motorcycle emergency. “I know that's not the only reason.”

Ryuji wiped his face with the back of his hand, getting a bunch of chain grease all over his face in the process. Akira didn't say so because it'd make him insufferable, but Akira privately found the whole blue-collar overalls-and-grease aesthetic on Ryuji to be mind-blowingly hot.

Ryuji looked sort of embarrassed, but finally said, “I just like goin' fast, you know? And if my legs won't do it anymore...then I'll take something that does.”

“Just remember to wear your helmet,” Akira said in his sweetest tone. Talking about this reminded him too much of juvie.

“Yes, _Mom_.”

“Is that your kink?”

Ryuji punched him in the thigh, not very hard, and Akira laughed. “I was trying to be serious, man. Will it kill you to have a real conversation once in a while? Jeez.”

x x x

Sometime after what would later be dubbed as Akira's Idiocy, Akira was off work for a while with a broken ankle (it had gotten crushed when the motorcycle dropped) and had very little to do at home, so he spent his time browsing the internet and reading.

Ryuji was very touchy at this time, since Akira had just crashed his bike, so he wasn't getting laid, either. Now about a hundred thousand yen in debt to Ryuji for the bike, plus behind on rent because he couldn't work, he was feeling quite grumpy himself.

He was spending the time browsing internet forums and feeling sorry for himself when there was a ring on the door. It took Akira a while to hobble over there, and by the time he got there, whoever had been ringing him was gone. Had someone just been pranking him, or what?

He looked down to the doorstep to see a box with a tiny little black kitten in it, looking pathetic and frankly too young to even be weaned.

“Aww, you poor thing,” Akira cooed, picking up the kitten.

That was when he noticed that the inside of the box was lined with...pages from a paperback? Kitten in his arms, Akira picked up a random page.

_Sana kept a list of every scumbag she'd ever encountered during the course of her career, and it just kept getting longer. For every criminal she helped put behind bars, there were two more in the station wearing uniforms and caps._

_It wasn't until that day, though, that she thought she'd do something about it._

“Huh.” Akira put the page back into the box and took the whole thing inside.

Akira Googled up what to do with a stray kitten, checked the little guy for fleas (clean), checked under his tail for sex (male) and with the last of his cash, went to the corner store to buy the cat some kibble, which it thankfully seemed he could eat.

While the kitten sat in a pile of blankets, happily munching away, Akira dumped the contents of the box out on the kitchen table and, with a roll of clear tape in hand, pieced together an only slightly peed-on copy of what seemed to be a mystery novel titled _Bloody Justice_ by Goro Akechi. It was rather time-consuming, but Akira had nothing better to do, and a free book was a free book.

He read it all in one sitting, ignoring when Ryuji came home and freaked out about the cat (“We aren't allowed pets, dude!”) so he could finish it, following which he immediately went to the internet to find out everything he could about this book and that author. It turned out it was a series, though there were just three books out so far, and the author was just starting to pick up in popularity.

Of course, Akira wasted no time snatching those books from the local library (actually snatching. He did not return them), reading them both in one sitting.

The books were about a lady detective named Sana Seigi who wasn't afraid to get her hands a little dirty to give the bad guys what was coming to them. She slid somewhere between hero and anti-hero, and it was hinted that there was a lot further for her to fall in future books.

After finishing all three, Akira returned to the internet. And this led him to a small fan forum where people were talking about the books. Of course, Akira just had to post his manifesto, which quickly went over the character count to fill up a bunch of comments as well.

 **Tl;dr Sana Seigi did nothing wrong,** he finished with.

The first reply was from a user named “Necronomicon.”

**Agreed. Glad to see someone else here has some brains.**

“What're you lookin' at?” Ryuji peered over his shoulder at his cell phone. Akira was sitting on the floor in front of their low table, eyes glued to his phone. “You've become such a net addict lately.”

“'Cause these books are _amazing,_ ” Akira gushed. “You gotta read them.”

“Eh. You know I'm not much of a reader.”

“Then let's go for a ride, and I'll tell you about 'em.”

“...You know just how to wrap me around your little finger, don't you? But no way in hell am I letting you drive my new bike.”

“Yeah, yeah, you've lectured me about that enough. I can't flip the gears with my ankle fucked up, anyway. So you get to make me your bitch today. I'll even pack us a little lunch. My apology for totalling your bike.” Akira really did feel bad about that.

Ryuji was so transparently excited, it was cute.

x x x

They were broke as hell, so lunch was more rice than content, and Akira had to borrow some cash from Ryuji's mom for gas money, but the weather was good and they got their weekend drive date, going up a mountain pass that was a favorite of Ryuji's to eat by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere while Akira babbled onto him about Sana Seigi.

“Jeez, marry the woman, already,” Ryuji teased. “I hope you're not gonna dump me for her.”

“I did jerk off with the pages of that paperback last night.”

“...You didn't.”

“Of course I didn't, you idiot. Wow, you'll believe anything.” Akira laughed as Ryuji punched him in the shoulder just as hard as he deserved.

They were silent for a little while, just sitting on the road barrier, looking up at the trees and the sky. They sat in front of a big drop-off, the road behind them empty aside from just the odd passing car.

“I know you don't like talking about this stuff,” Ryuji said after a while, “and you can be an annoying fuck sometimes, but...I can see us together for a long time. ...Can you?”

Akira didn't look at him. His eyes were on the sky, the blood-red of the sunset. “Actually, Ryuji... once my ankle heals, I think I'm joining the SDF.”

“What?” Ryuji looked stunned.

“I know this is sudden. But you know I'm broke as shit. Construction isn't getting me anywhere. Now I owe your mom money, too. I'm not going to find anything decent, with my record. The military is my only option.”

“So wait—are you—are you dumping me for this? Is that what this little date is about?” Ryuji got to his feet and turned around, sounding a little freaked out. “Man, now I feel like an idiot for having a good time.”

“I'm not saying we _have_ to. It'd just be hard, you know?" Akira twisted around to look at Ryuji's back. "Maybe it's better to break up than to force it for years.”

“ _Force it?_ Is that what it feels like to you?”

“Ryuji...”

“You know, I was gonna keep my mouth shut, but now that it's out in the open, I'm just gonna say it." Ryuji turned around to face Akira again. "I feel like I'm way more into this than you are. I always have. You know everything about my life—you've met my mom, my friends, you know about everything that happened before I got to juvie. But you never tell me anything. You never even told me what got you in, you just hinted at it and I never brought it up 'cause of the rules, and after, I just thought I shouldn't. And then when you beat up that guard, you kept trying to pretend it wasn't you. You never told me what the deal is with your parents, or if you even have them. You just called and showed up. And moving in together hasn't changed anything. I feel like I don't even know who you are. I think the only thing I know about you is that you like those goddamn books. And you just...do all this shit without telling me or talking to me! Like getting a cat!”

Akira didn't have anything to say in reply. Everything Ryuji said was completely true.

“So you're dumping me over Morgana, huh?” Akira asked, tone teasing, as he turned back to look at the sunset.

“Agh, can you not joke right now?”

“I knew it was the cat hair.”

“Fuck you, seriously.”

“This is gonna be an awkward ride back, then,” Akira said with a wry smile as he stood up to go.

Ryuji laughed, but it sounded humorless and a bit like a sob, and his back remained facing Akira.

The ride back was silent.

Akira just pressed his face against the back of Ryuji's leather jacket, eyes closed, and fantasized about putting a bullet in the skull of everyone who had ever wronged them.

 


End file.
